Sea of Glass
POV: dalinar
Summary
A highstorm rolls in over the warcamps in late afternoon, faster than the stormwardens predicted, and Dalinar takes it where he has taken every previous one: alone, in the top room of the Kholin complex, with the shutters open. The first lash of stormwall hits the building. The lights die. The vision takes him.
He stands on a plain of black obsidian glass under a low black sun. There is no wind. The glass is shot through with veins of something faintly luminous that pulse with the rhythm of his own heart. He walks. He has been in many of these visions now — Nohadon's city, the abandoned village, the keep at the fall — but this one is the emptiest of them. There is nothing to do here. There is nothing to fight. The point of the vision, he understands, is that he is being shown what is left after the fight.
The voice of the Stormfather speaks to him from the air itself, as it has at the close of every vision, only now without the curtain of the world between them. The visions will end now, the voice tells him. He has been given what he needs. He must act on it. *Unite them.* *I cannot fight him. I can only prepare you. Find the most important words a man can say.* The vision releases him back into the highstorm and the dark of the top room. He sits in the darkness with the windows rattling and writes nothing down. He already knows. He will need Elhokar to abdicate, or to be replaced, or to be persuaded; he will need the highprinces to follow a single banner; he will need an army that fights for something other than gemhearts. He will need, almost certainly, to fail before he succeeds.